Courtesans at Table

Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.

Laura K. McClure is Associate Professor of Classics and Chair of the Integrated Liberal Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has edited two essay collections on women and sexuality in ancient Greece, and has written a book on speech and gender in Greek drama.